


last night I dreamed about you (I dreamed that you were riding)

by ghostrunner



Category: Justified
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-20
Updated: 2014-03-20
Packaged: 2018-01-16 10:00:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1343392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostrunner/pseuds/ghostrunner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing changes. Time is a river and Harlan is a rock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	last night I dreamed about you (I dreamed that you were riding)

“I’ll be back in ten minutes, Johnny, try to hold things together until then,” Boyd is saying. He walks out of the hardware store and turns the corner and his truck is gone.

In its place is a big bay gelding tied up to the hitching post in front of the post office. The hitching post has always been there. The horse is new. (Old.)

The sky is pale and pitiless like a great blind eye and the only sound for miles is the call of birds and the steady clang of metal on metal. His boots are heavy-heeled and pinch at the toes. 

Every step forward feels like a slow-motion fall and there’s a sound ringing in his head like thunder, heat lightning on a clear day and all of this is wrong but he knows that horse is his like he knows his name and the scars on his chest and his way home. 

A car horn screeches at him and he’s standing in the street and the thunder is traffic and Johnny in his ear is calling his name with increasing vehemence. 

“I’m alright,” Boyd says. “I’m alright.”

His truck is just where he left it. 

\--

He walks up to the door of the little wooden house and Ava says, “Boyd,” not like an invitation; just an acknowledgement of his presence. He comes in anyway, takes his hat off to her. “Mrs. Crowder.”

Boyd gave a speech at her trial about justice and forgiveness and the casting of stones. The townspeople voted not to hang her so she’s still here, in the house that Bowman built, wearing a faded blue dress and no jewelry, offering her dead husband’s brother tea, and then whiskey, wishing he’d just leave her alone. 

“Ava, if I may,” he says, “there are a few ways in which you could improve your situation. I’d like to help you, if you’d let me.”

“If I may, Boyd,” she says back, sharp and sweet like only a southern woman can be, “I know precisely how you’d like to help and I’d sooner rot.”

Boyd sips warm whiskey, puts the cup back in its saucer. “Now, Ava,” he starts to say…

And Ava’s saying, “Boyd? Boyd? Honey, you alright?”

The ice in his glass rattles as he lets it go an inch from the table top. 

“Yeah, baby,” he says. “I’m just fine.”

\--

The tightness of his collar is familiar but the clerical tab in it is not. His hands are rough on the dusty black leather bible, on the Colt .45 at his hip. 

His spurs chime when he walks, nothing like church bells. 

\--

Raylan keeps his left hand tucked through the bridle of the light dun stallion nosing at his shoulder. No one needs to look to see where his right hand is.

Boyd thinks, death on a pale horse, with only a mild sense of hysteria. 

“Funny thing,” says Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens. “Four hundred head of cattle went missing over the drive to Lexington.” The star on his breast pocket and the buttons on his waistcoat throw sunlight fit to blind a man. Everything about Raylan Givens is a weapon. 

“Is that a fact, Marshal,” says Boyd not like a question at all and largely for the benefit of the four men standing behind him with trail dust on their boots and sleeplessness in their eyes. 

“Mmhm,” Raylan hums, not like he’s thinking because he already knows and Boyd feels a grin tug at the corners of his mouth, hides it by smoothing his mustache. 

“Well, Marshal, if I hear anything that might be a help to you, be assured I will come calling.”

Raylan squints, resettles his hat, runs his thumb over the butt of his gun. 

“You do that, Boyd,” he says. And he drums his hand on the roof of his Lincoln Towncar for emphasis. 

\--

The sheets are cotton and the bed frame is iron and Raylan spreads Boyd out across the uneven mattress like he’s doing him a favor. 

His tattoos are gone, Boyd notes. 

The bullet scar on his chest is still there. 

Raylan doesn’t ask about the cattle or the whiskey or the shipment of Winchester rifles because none of these are really questions. Not because he doesn’t want to know, but because he already does. 

Boyd kisses him for it, all stubble and teeth and dark intent. 

“Want to tell me about how we’re damned?” Raylan whispers low and rough into the skin just above Boyd’s ear. 

Boyd draws breath to laugh, loses it in a groan as Raylan fits them together. 

“Maybe later,” he says. 

Ava tosses her hair back, rising above him like a wave made of flesh and light and Victoria’s Secret. “You still with me, baby?”

Boyd says, “Right here, darlin’. Where else would I be?”

\--


End file.
